Student essay: Life lessons of the Fourmile Fire

A young victim reflects on what she lost -- and gained

A plane drops retardant on the Fourmile Fire last Sept. 7 -- the second day of the fire.
(
PAUL AIKEN
)

The following is a senior essay written by Taylor Weathers, then 17, after her family's home on Sunshine Canyon Drive burned down in the Fourmile Fire, which started one year ago Tuesday.

If I think about it hard enough, I can see it perfectly. The flames engulfing my house and reaching up to the sky as piece by piece, it falls to ashes. In a certain way, it's completely surreal.

One day, your home, filled with years of memories, is there, and the next it's not.

The second I found out, the first thing that came to mind was how could this be happening to me? This is what happens to other people in a distant place, in which you feel a pang of pity and then never give it another thought.

But no, it had happened to me, and it wasn't something I could just forget. Everything that had been familiar to me my entire life was gone.

The first time I cried I was thinking about my seashells, my beloved seashells, which my tiny child palms had picked up off the shores of Sanibel for as long as I could remember. There were hundreds of them, packed in a crisp cardboard box that held my childhood.

And then there was the tree -- that scraggly little pine tree that I had been decorating with old wooden ornaments since my first Christmas. The tree that, no matter how much older or wiser I became, would always sit in the corner of my room when the cold weather came around casting bright little beams of light across the wall.

As much as I so dearly loved these things, from the bottom of my heart, in the end, I found they are just things. They have fallen to ashes, and forced me to surrender and ultimately realize that what the fire could not touch are my memories. Those are always mine, to take with me wherever I go.

And in the end, they are all that is left and now all that I have.

The one thing left in the scorched plot of ground amidst the ashes was a stone angel. This angel had been in the yard on the side of our house, not two feet from the walls that had been enveloped in fire.

Then when I saw a picture of it, it took my breath away. The three-foot-tall stone angel was standing erect, totally untouched or charred sitting on a tiny green plot of grass surrounding the base, while the grass surrounding it for hundreds of feet was scorched black and burned to the soil.

That angel had given me faith. It is an unfaltering symbol telling me that I will be OK. That this experience will make me stronger. And what I have lost in things, I have gained in spirit.

It is now a new beginning, and one that I will not take lightly. It has taught me, in the harshest way possible, never to put too much investment in objects -- things that can be so easily taken away from you in a heartbeat.

This has taught me, rather, to put my investment in people, and the connections and happiness they can bring you.

After this traumatic event, I would rather spend money on traveling with the ones that I love rather than buy some expensive object in a store, creating memories and experiences that will shape me as a person and that can never be taken from me.

Because I now know, without a gleam of a doubt, that our empty hands truly hold all we really own.